1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to monitoring and control systems, and in particular to an electronic monitoring and control system for externally monitoring processes in one or more computer systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Computing environments are integrated with others across a room, in another building, and perhaps in another part of the country. To help aid in the monitoring process of these computing environments, many of these computer systems include an operating console which is displayed on a video display. The operating console shows the status of various system components such as disk drives, chillers, data communication lines, etc.
The functioning of integrated computing environments requires the automation of some of the routine control situations like restarting a computer system, calling a repair or service representative, and rerouting data communication links. Such automation has been done in the past by adding additional hardware and software agents or processes which run on the computer system being monitored. The disadvantage of such approaches are that they are inflexible to changes made to the underlying computer system. For example, if a controller board is added to a mainframe computer and then that system is updated to a new data bus type, the old controller board is no longer useful. Similarly, when software agents are run on the computer system to be monitored, they must be tailored to the operating system being run on the computer system and must be tested to determine whether they interfere with other software or processes which are to be run on the computer system.
A better solution to this monitoring and control problem would be to find a way to perform these operations without adding hardware or software to the computer system to be monitored. The present invention provides a solution to this and other problems, and offers other advantages.